In recent years, the commercially successful models of mobile telephones have been the ones which have been the most compact. The desire for small size has prevented other devices, most notably printers, from being incorporated into the housings of mobile telephones.
Prior art printers incorporate a supply of print media into the printer and employ a print media feed mechanism to transport the print media past the printhead(s) to effect printing onto the print media. It is essential during a printing operation to synchronise the speed of the print media with the printing rate of the printhead(s) to ensure a faithful reproduction of the image being printed. Heretofore, the synchronisation of the print media with the printhead(s) has been relatively simple to accomplish because the print media feed mechanism, including the supply of print media, forms an integral part of the printer. The speed of the print media is therefore known and fixed, as is the speed at which the printhead(s) and print controller operate, with synchronisation between these features being accomplished using simple mechanical features such as gears, stepper motors and the like.
Such features however, in particular the need to have a supply of print media accommodated within the printer, have made these printers larger and heavier than they otherwise need be. Even in more compact printers employing a monolithic page-width drop-on-demand printhead arrangement of the type described in the above mentioned co-pending applications, where the printhead is fixed, there is still a need to have a supply of print media and a print media drive mechanism integral to the printer to ensure proper synchronisation between ink ejection and the motion of the print media. Up until now these requirements have limited the minimum possible printer size and have precluded the possibility of a printer being incorporated into a device such as a compact mobile telephone.